the dharma of doo-doo

It always does my heart good when I hear a student talk about how yoga has helped them in their life. Most of the realizations I've heard are more about the non-physical than the physical, things on a deeper level than achieving an arm balance or handstand. I sit back and say to myself (or sometimes out loud), yes, they get it, someone has been paying attention!

I've always said that yoga is about life so what better teaching than a pile of dog doo-doo in the middle of a bike path.

A few weeks ago I had told my students that at Will Kabat-Zinn's retreat he had talked about how one little thought can create our reality in a second. For example, we're walking down the street and we pass someone, we assign the word "creepy", and our mind instantly creates an entire story about that person, we create an entire world around that person. Will said, "you never know what someone else's story is." In other words, just as the Buddha taught, be on the lookout as to how your thoughts create your reality.

Then on Saturday morning during the yin part of our practice I read excerpts from Sarah Powers' chapter in Freeing the Body, Freeing the Mind: Writings on the Connections Between Yoga & Buddhism.

Sarah wrote about how embroiled she became in her emotions as she laid in bed bathed in sweat from the heat. She said she became "utterly intolerant of my experience and before I knew it, I was defiantly standing, almost expecting I would encounter an enemy lurking." Sarah said that as she simply watched her intense emotions she became aware of how her angst effortlessly slipped away and how she began to feel calm and present. She was astonished at how a strong emotion can decompose as she mindfully turned her attention inward to her direct experience in the moment. Her next moment was no less fiery, but her inner attitude had shifted. Her experience of the sweltering heat had changed simply because her attention had shifted from resistance to mindful observation.

As my students were in sphinx post one of them told the story of how she was walking her favorite path and she experienced what Sarah experienced: the shift from rage to mindful observation of her fiery emotions:

"On my first lap I just missed stepping in some dog poop in the middle of the paved walking path that circled my neighborhood park. I was enraged that someone would let their dog defecate on the walkway without cleaning it up and assumed it came from the large dog being walked by a woman I had just passed going in the opposite direction a few minutes earlier. I spent the rest of my first lap feeling irritated and blaming this woman for not cleaning up after her dog.

When I got to that same spot during my second lap, I still felt irritated and decided dogs should not be allowed in the park.

On my third lap I began to wonder whether or not the poop had perhaps been there for several hours, which would then exonerate the dog currently in the park as well as his owner. My irritation began to dissipate.

On the fourth lap I realized I had no way of knowing if it was this woman's dog that had made the mess, so I really couldn't blame her. I didn't think anymore about it as I finished the lap.

On the fifth lap, I reminded myself there was poop on the walk but it no longer upset me. An oncoming jogger and I smiled at each other was we both sidestepped the mess."

After my student told her story I clapped and thanked her for sharing this marvelous teaching. "You get it!," I told her, "You've no idea how this does my heart good, thank you for listening all these years!" I asked if she felt these emotions in her body -- Buddha's First Foundation of Mindfulness. Yes, she said. I told her that ultimately on the fifth lap she experienced Buddha's Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness, mindfulness of the dharma, i.e., the nature of reality which is impermanence -- all things change. Her feelings of rage at the dog poop in the middle of the bike path during the first lap had changed to feelings of neutrality by the fifth lap. My student's thoughts on first seeing the dog poop and then a woman and her dog had created her reality and her own suffering. If we are paying attention we notice how all things are temporary. That's awakening, and it comes slowly but surely.

I said, "See how our thoughts create our reality? You created your own suffering all because of a pile in the middle of the path." I asked whether she would have noticed these subtle shifts of consciousness if this had happened before she started a yoga and mindfulness practice. Her answer was no.

Yoga is Life. All things are a training. Even a hot steaming mess in the middle of your Path.

Mark Whitwell, part 2: enlightenment, head yoga, and all that other stuff

"There is nothing to attain! There is no such thing as enlightenment, only Life in you as you. No need to realize God when God has realized you. It is intimacy we want and it is freely given. It is the search that is the problem. Looking for something presumes its absence. As long as we strive for a higher reality, the looking implies this life is a lower reality."

Those words are from Mark Whitwell's Facebook page, but he talks about this in his workshops.

Last year I heard a few gasps when Mark told us "stop meditating!" I smiled when he said that because I knew exactly what he meant: that meditation should be part of your life 24/7. Not the formal sitting on a cushion but if meditation comes as a siddhi as Mark claims, then this intuitive inwardness is always with you. As I tell my students, ultimately you don't turn it off and on like a switch. Just like the space between asanas is still asana, you don't turn it off and on when you move from one pose to another. It should needs to always be there, this mindfulness practiced as asana, this formless quietude between the shapes that we take.

Our sadhana is yoga + pranayama. As I also tell my students, you don't always have to sit and do a formal pranayama practice as I have seen in yoga classes so many times. That is, structured segments of this, then you do this, then you do this. Frankly, in all my years of yoga, I have never heard any teacher say that your conscious breathing IS pranayama, that your embodied breathing IS pranayama, that you should embrace your breath instead of being a witness to it. The guru to the asana is breath, that is what Krishnamacharya taught. The breath is always first, not the asana. You don't start the asana and then think about the breath.

Of course all the techniques such as nadi shodana, surya bhedana, chandra bhedana etc. are formal pranayama practices (kapalabhati is not considered pranayama in my lineage, it is considered a kriya), but I have never heard the breathing that I was taught at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram and the breath work that Mark teaches (and that svasti described here) ever referred to as pranayama. Sometimes I think my students get sick of me talking so much about the breath. During class I ask them, "how's the breath? and where is your mind?" Most times I get back, "I'm holding it, and I'm thinking about lunch." There ya go. Switch on, switch off.

As for enlightenment, people are so anxious to get somewhere else other than where they are right now. I am always amused to hear what people think "enlightenment" is. After he sat under the bodhi tree, the Buddha merely said he was "awake." Awake to what? Awake to the truth of living, the nature of reality, awake to the causes of suffering but also awake to the end of suffering. Not running, but embracing reality AS IT IS.

Mark says it's not enlightenment we want but "intimacy with life in every aspect; stop looking and start living."

So how do we truly live when we're trying to get away from life, from our minds? People think meditation is stopping the mind, stopping thoughts -- that's just another way of trying to stop life.

When I was in teaching in Africa one of the students asked me during the dharma talk how to stop her thoughts when she sits. I told her, "stop trying." She looked as if I had slapped her and I saw a flash of insight that looked like relief. After the talk she was the only student who engaged me in a deep conversation about meditation and she said she felt like a rock was lifted off her shoulders. I said, "You see? Your flash of insight was one step closer to liberation. It is so exceedingly simple, but not easy." When the weekend was over she told me how much deeper her practice was because she stopped fighting. As Mark says, it was her search that was the problem. You can't get it by trying to get it.

Mark said that we must have a connection to our embodiment of body + breath before mindfulness (and he calls it mindFULLness, which I love) can begin. He said if there is no embodiment, if there is no asana + pranayama, dharma teachings remain abstract.

I found his comment interesting because I'm reading The Great Oom, the book about how an early 20th century yogi named Perry Baker (aka Pierre Bernard) brought body/breath based tantric yoga to his communities in the Gilded Age, something that was quite shocking at the time.

The author states how Vivekananda brought his meditation-based yoga to America as the "safe and practical way" for Westerners to dial into infinite. Vivekananda, who started the Vedanta Society, expounded at great length on the three paths of devotion mentioned in the Bhagavad Gita -- karma, bhakti, and jnana yoga -- yoga from the neck up as the author of the Great Oom calls it.

"Vedanists and Theosophists shared the view that hatha yoga's body-centered practices were queer and dangerous. Blavatsky [founder of the Theosophical Society] warned that pranayama was 'injurious to health' and useless to those seeking spiritual liberation. Vivekananda dismissed hatha yoga's asanas as 'nothing but a kind of gymnastics,' and later put a finer point on it for curious followers. 'We have nothing to do with it...because its practices are very difficult, and cannot be learned in a day, and after all, do not lead to much spiritual growth.'...

'Body and soul are co-existent.' Bernard insisted. 'One is but a manifestation of the other. The best way to perfect the soul is through the body and the senses.'

The Great Oom, pp. 72-73

Mark referred to the swamis who came to the West as doing "Hindu missionary work" instead of bringing yoga. The author of The Great Oom writes:

"In India, hatha yogis were forced to the margins of society, as they had been for centuries, not only by the British colonizers and their Indian sympathizers but also by Christian missionaries from the West, who saw such practices as the embodiment of heathenism. As a result, the generation of educated monks who came to America around the turn of the century were essentially a coterie of Theosophical-leaning Tantric-deniers and hatha haters."

The Great Oom, p. 73

Hatha yoga IS tantric yoga, according to Mark, because tantra is the direct participation in life. HA = the masculine, THA = the feminine, and if breath is the reason for asana as Mark believes and we become directly intimate with life via asana + pranayama, then hatha yoga is the pathway to the Universe that is in us. No more discussions needed on "what is tantric yoga."

Without our embodiment of asana and pranayama, the teachings, the dharma, are abstractions that are not realized. "Yoga from the neck up" is DISembodiment.

In my opinion, the embodiment that Mark talks about is similar to what Buddha taught in his Four Foundations of Mindfulness -- unless we are fully embodied in breath and body, how can we know the dharma of the nature of reality which is impermanence? And fully knowing this truth, via the body/breath/mind, will we run from it or allow it to liberate us to become fully intimate with life?

Does this full knowing of the dharma of reality, the truth of impermanence, then allow us to fully embrace the juiciness of life from day to day, the intimacy with life that Mark speaks about?

I choose to be a rasa devi.

Love your body's embrace of reality and truth.